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The sacred mysteries essential to Viking survival will be lost if Inge Andersdottir cannot find a daughter to inherit the ancient wisdom. Inge and her husband Karl-Eirik adopt Thora, a young thrall with skaldic (poetic) powers and more. Thora kills a glasscaster and the king condemns her to Lesser Outlawry: a long season of exile to the rivers of Russia and then Istanbul - on Karl's boat, The Seafarer. Reluctantly, Inge agrees to go along and finds a stormy voyage – a grueling portage, an encounter with the Overlord of Kiev, her former lover, with a suspected Greek spy and an attack by the savage Pechenegs. The crew must deal with an unexpected change in captains. Thora is captured and put into an Arab harem. It is up to Inge and her wondrous skills to save the boat, the crew and her daughter.
Mass violence comes not only from states, but also from people. By analyzing mass violence as social interaction through survivor accounts and other sources, this book presents understudied agents, aims and practices of direct violence and ways of action of those under persecution. Sound history – examining the noises of mass violence and persecution – is particularly telling about such practices. This volume shows that violence can become socially hegemonic, and some people claim a freedom to kill as a political right. To scrutinize indirect violence, which is often imperialist in character and claims many victims, the book proposes the concept of conditions of violence. These conditions are produced by definable groups of actors and foreseeably harm definable groups (which differs from the anonymous and static ‘structural violence’). This is exemplified in a case study concerning famines in World War II and another on COVID-19 as mass violence. Less global in character, other case studies in this volume deal with Rwanda, Bangladesh/East Pakistan and the Soviet Union.
In 1859 the Finnish-Swedish aristocrat and naval officer, Hampus Furuhjelm arrived in Alaska as one of the Russian colony's last ambassadors. He brought with him his young wife Anna Furuhjelm, who wrote many long letters in English to her mother. These letters, for the first time, give us a vivid picture of everyday life in the colonial capital, Sitka, in the period shortly before the USA. took over Alaska. The letters have been edited and commented by Anna Furuhjelm's great-granddaughter, Anni Christensen.
This book deals with film adaptations of literary works created in Communist Czechoslovakia between 1954 and 1969, such as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (Zeman 1958), Marketa Lazarová (Vláčil 1967), and The Joke (Jireš 1969). Bubeníček treats a historically significant period around which myths and misinformation have arisen. The book is broad in scope and examines aesthetic, political, social, and cultural issues. It sets out to disprove the notion that the state-controlled film industry behind the Iron Curtain produced only aesthetically uniform works pandering to official ideology. Bubeníček’s main aim is to show how the political situation of Communist Czechoslovakia moulded the film adaptations created there, but also how these same works, in turn, shaped the sociocultural conditions of the 1950s and the 1960s.
Film festivals during the Cold War were fraught with the political and social tensions that dominated the world at the time. While film was becoming an increasingly powerful medium, the European festivals in particular established themselves as showcases for filmmakers and their perceptions of reality. At the same time, their prestigious, international character attracted the interest of states and private players. The history of these festivals thus sheds light not only on the films they made available to various publics, but on the cultural policies and political processes that informed their operations. Presenting new research by an international group of younger scholars, Cultural Transfer and Political Conflicts critically investigates postwar history in the context of film festivals reconstructing not only their social background and international dispensation, but also their centrality for cultural transfers between the East, the West and the South during the Cold War.
At first, Karl Gray was a POW who wandered down the wrong tunnel underneath a church in the Balkans. That fateful turn took him to Amlydar, the world where his parents had been Empress and Lord-Protector. To survive, Karl Gray has to restore an exiled Princess to her throne, become a Stonekin friend of the trolls, and survive the warlocks who murdered his parents. Even after leaving Amlydar to heal from an assassination attempt, Karl Gray returns to the forested world to quell the rebellion of insane Imperator Nargon and the Tyrant of Tash. Even as he settles the problems of northern Amlydar, he encounters a trio of deadly vampires, a warlock still learning his craft, and the Apenecks who extirpated the Graywolf Clan in Amlydar and the Outworld. If he can bring peace to Amlydar, he may start new dynasties and reunite with the long lost son he has not seen in decades.
This volume examines how numerous international transfers, circulations, and exchanges shaped the world of socialism during the Cold War. Over the course of half a century, the Soviets shaped politics, values and material culture throughout the vast space of Eurasia, and foreign forces in turn often influenced Soviet policies and society. The result was the distinct and interconnected world of socialism, or the Socialist Second World. Drawing on previously unavailable archival sources and cutting-edge insights from “New Cold War” and transnational histories, the twelve contributors to this volume focus on diverse cultural and social forms of this global socialist exchange: the cults of c...